WACO, Texas (CN) — Cecily Aguilar spent three hours helping law enforcement officers find her boyfriend Aaron Robinson, who was accused of beating Army specialist Vanessa Guillen to death in April 2020, before her interviewer placed her under arrest and first read Aguilar her Miranda rights.
“I’m going to jail? I thought that was why I was doing all this,” Aguilar protested during her July 1, 2020, interview with law enforcement officials.
“I brought you in here voluntarily,” replied Travis Dendy, the Texas Ranger to whom Aguilar detailed dismembering and burying Guillen’s body near the Leon River in Belton, Texas, on her boyfriend’s orders.
On Wednesday, the federal judge presiding over Aguilar’s criminal trial decided that this confession, obtained in an interrogation room at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, was not unconstitutionally acquired.
“The court is going to deny the motion to suppress. I will get out a more robust order as quickly as I can,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright said at the conclusion of a three-hour hearing on Aguilar’s motion to suppress her confession.
Aguilar was being interviewed that night because state and federal law enforcement officers had followed her from the gas station convenience store where she worked to Fort Hood before detaining her for trespassing at the Army post, where she was not permitted.
In the motion to suppress, Aguilar’s attorney Lewis Gainor originally argued that her arrest was not based on reasonable suspicion or probable cause, but withdrew this line of argument during the hearing. Rather, Gainor said that precisely because the detainment was proper, any reasonable person in Aguilar’s position would have believed they were under arrest and therefore should have received the Miranda rights at that point.
Aguilar was only read her rights after she finished confessing to the interrogating officer, who described Aguilar as “surprised” to discover that she was going to jail in his testimony Wednesday. Aguilar had repeatedly called her boyfriend, Robinson, on the phone in an attempt to help local police find him.
When Killeen police and U.S. Marshals found and approached Robinson that day, he pulled out a firearm and shot himself to death. Dendy withheld this information from Aguilar for the rest of her interview.
According to Aguilar’s confession as described in court records, Robinson told Aguilar that he had hit Guillen’s head with a hammer in an armory room at Fort Hood that he supervised on April 22, 2020.
Aguilar’s motion says she thought that cooperating with investigators would ensure her freedom. During Gainor’s questioning of Dendy, the Ranger agreed that he was seeking “answers that would be inculpatory” or constitute a “confession,” concurring that it is not illegal for investigators to deceive suspects in order to elicit a confession.
But the court was swayed by the government's arguments.
“If I understand opposing counsel’s argument, any time a suspect came in and gave a confession without Miranda, they’d automatically be subject to suppression,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Frazier argued before the court.
Frazier highlighted a moment in the interview when Aguilar insisted she had helped Robinson mutilate and bury Guillen’s body only because she was there against her will — which Dendy misheard as indicating that Aguilar thought she was in the interrogation room against her will.
When Dendy asked Aguilar if she thought she was there involuntarily, she cut him off, saying “Not here.”
Though Albright has not yet issued a written order justifying the ruling, the Donald Trump-appointed judge seemed to agree that this statement indicated that Aguilar had thought of herself as willingly offering a confession, and did not believe herself to be under arrest as she spoke to Dendy.
Guillen’s family and friends protested in front of the federal courthouse in Waco before the hearing, demanding that Aguilar should stay in jail.
Aguilar’s motion to dismiss her indictment — which formally accuses her of destroying “records, documents, or other objects” and of conspiring to do so — is pending before the court, and both the defense and prosecution must brief the court on the issue. The lawyers also told Albright that they would finalize discovery so that the case can be placed on the court’s speedy trial docket.
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